Feature Point Based Mesh Deformation Applied to MPEG-4 Facial Animation

Robustness and speed are primary considerations when developing deformation methodologies for animatable mesh objects. The goal of this paper is to present such a robust and fast geometric mesh deformation algorithm. The algorithm is feature points based i.e. it can be applied to enable the animation of various mesh objects defined by the placement of their feature points. As a specific application, we describe the use of the algorithm for MPEG-4 facial mesh deformation and animation. The MPEG-4 face object is characterized by the Face Definition Parameters (FDP), which are defined by the locations of the key feature points on the face. The MPEG-4 compatible facial animation system developed using this algorithm can be effectively used for real time applications. We extract MPEG-4 Facial Animation Parameters (FAP) using an optical tracking system and apply the results to several synthetic facial mesh objects to assess the results of the deformation algorithm.